Palestine has become a domestic electoral issue in Britain for the first time, according to the incoming head of the country’s largest Palestinian solidarity organisation. Aimee Shalan, who will take over as director of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) in November, joins the organisation as demonstrations against Israel’s war in Gaza have snowballed into what organisers describe as one of the most sustained protest movements in modern British history. She said public anger over Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and Britain’s response was increasingly being expressed not just through demonstrations but at elections, in workplaces and trade unions and through consumer campaigns.
Speaking before a PSC protest at the Labour party conference, Shalan said: “We’re seeing for the first time in British history Palestine become a domestic issue, electorally, at the national level and at the local level.” The shift was visible at the 2024 general election and 2026 local elections, where pro-Palestinian candidates made major breakthroughs. Shalan pointed to the foreign secretary Ed Miliband’s announcement of sanctions against settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories as a notable success for their movement. Miliband said at the Labour conference on Monday: “I want to say to the millions of people in this country and indeed elsewhere who have been moved and outraged by the plight of the Palestinian people: we hear you, you were right.” He described the sanctions as a definitive change in how Labour would approach the situation in the Middle East.
Shalan said: “That shift is a testament to the mass movement. Both internationally, but specifically also here in Britain, with hundreds of thousands of people marching, campaigning, lobbying. She pointed to the 70,000 Palestinians killed in Israel’s war in Gaza and the more than 1,300, including at least 300 children, killed since a ceasefire was signed last year.
The PSC says its individual membership has more than doubled from 7,800 at the beginning of 2023 to nearly 17,000, with subscribers to its newsletters rising from 70,000 to about 300,000. Along with partner groups, it has organised 36 national demonstrations since October 2023, some drawing hundreds of thousands of people. Organisers say the demonstrations represent one of the largest and most sustained protest movements in British history.
Shalan said: “It’s been uplifting to see the level of support and the connections that people are making between their own lives, and other liberation and social justice struggles, and the Palestinian cause.” But the demonstrations have been contested. Some politicians and campaign groups have raised concerns about antisemitism surrounding pro-Palestinian protests, with critics describing them as “hate marches”. Shalan rejected that characterisation as a smear against the movement, saying: “Those marches have been a really wonderful coming together of communities of all sorts of different faiths, of all sorts of different backgrounds, young and old, of all sorts of different ethnicities.” Shalan also rejected calls for the PSC to be designated an extremist organisation, arguing that attempts to criminalise parts of the Palestine solidarity movement were increasingly at odds with public opinion.
The PSC says 34 councils in England and Wales have committed to supporting the divestment of their pension funds from companies that campaigners accuse of complicity in Israel’s actions. The PSC’s influence has also grown within the trade union movement. The Trades Union Congress is backing the Palestinian-led boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement, supporting workplace campaigns and divestment from companies it says are complicit in abuses against Palestinians.
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